I’ve concluded that baking books are just plain hard to write. The measurements are finicky, your readers have different kinds of equipment and ovens running at different temperatures, and any number of small errors in the book production process can doom a recipe to failure. I don’t review very many baking books – maybe 4 a year – and about half of them generally involve some sad little tale of testing gone awry. Books like The Fearless Baker, Baked Elements, Dorie Greenspan’s Baking, and Joanne Chang’s Flour I prize all the more because they actually worked (at least in my kitchen).